Rays of Sunshine 2003
Rays of Sunshine is governed by repetition and sameness. It is an exercise in disintegration through variation. As an extension of Series 1 and 2, it takes the basic motivation behind those works and extends the duration of time as a way to deal with my issues with whiteness. One hundred portraits of the same white guy from the original football portrait sources rendered during a six-month period.
I decided to use the “smiling portrait” image as the catalyst for this series. From my perspective, this provided me with a malleable platform to distort and disintegrate through the painting process. My initial research for the project located classic Greek statuary specifically portrait busts as a foundation for constructing images for Rays of Sunshine. A conceptual relation between idealization and criticism progressively builds as the images undergo through a breakdown process.
A performative gesture undergirds the works collectively as it ultimately becomes a record of the six-month process of repetition and sameness. The physical act of constructing and deconstructing the same image through the duration of one hundred works suggests resolution, but the culmination becomes an arbitrary stop. This process could continue indefinitely.